Kerouac in Queens

These works first appeared in the literary zine: Chronicles of Disorder (1995-2000)


Letters From Readers:


Dear Sir,
I am in possession of different items that belonged to Mr. Kerouac like photos, pens,
eyeglasses and a typewriter. The time involved in gathering these items again are
not available to me. Even some unfinished works are stored away, but my time is not able.

I would be willing to sell you Jack Kerouac’s typewriter for $2,000.
I have no use for it really. The pictuires and manuscript will stay in my posession.
If you are interested, please send the money and I will ship you the typewriter.

Yours Truly,
(Name Withheld)
Ozone Park, Queens, NY. April 13, 1996.


Dear Sir:
I only knew Jack in high school but he was two years ahead of me. I can only say he
was the male star of the school the one year we were in high school together.
At that time he was primarily idolized as an athlete – excelling in football and track –
and all the girls though he was very handsome, which he was.

I can only say that during this time he showed little, if any literary talent that would prognosticate his later meteoric literary rise. I believe it was in college that his literary talents burst like a gusher.
If I remember, he had gone to Columbia on an athletic scholarship. I do not know if he graduated.

- John Tatsos
Port Richy, Fla. Aug. 8, 1996.


Hi,
Jack rented a second floor apartment from my grandfather. The only thing I remember
is my grandfather calling him a bongo-drum playing hippie.
I was told he would play the bongos in the apartment all the time.

-Dot Bergeron
Lowell, Mass. July 30, 1996.

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JACK KEROUAC IN QUEENS

June, 1943.
Kerouac joins his parents at their new apartment at 133-01 Crossbay Blvd., Ozone Park.

I came home in civvies to their new apartment over a drugstore in Ozone Park
on a hot June morning. (VD, p.173)

Outside, cars pass by on the multi-laned boulevard that leads north, into the center of Queens and south, to Jamaica Bay.

Red sun in June, the cars shizzing by on the boulevard, the smell of exhaust but a nice wind all the time from the nearby sea immediately blowing it all away, and also nice trees around. (VD, p. 174).

I’d look out the window at the darkness of the Queens night and feel a nauseating gulp to see those poor streetlamps stretching into the murmurous city like a string of woes.(VD, p. 272).


The nights would be filled with journeys to Manhattan to meet with friends Allen Ginsberg
and William Burroughs, among others, before returning in the morning to Queens,
where his parents Leo and Memere waited, sitting by the window for hours watching
for Jack to come walking home.

I brought Johnnie home to meet them and we had beers in the German tavern on Liberty Avenue and Cross Bay Boulevard (VD, p. 197).

Beneath the second-storey apartment, at the drugstore downstairs, Kerouac receives long, rambling phone calls from Neal Cassady, and works there briefly as a soda jerk.
There are visits as well at the apartment where Cassady would sometimes take refuge and inspired the early dialogue of the friendship that would later fuel Kerouac’s book,
“On The Road.”

In 1947, when we planned to go West together I formed a vision of you…in fact, if you can remember, we took a long bus from my house on Crossbay Blvd., Ozone Park, for a short ride to that little old library half-mile away, and talked on the way about wranglers in the West. (JKL, “Letter to Neal Cassady,” p. 306).

Kerouac’s father, Leo, died in the apartment in Spring, 1946. Over the next two years,
Jack sat at the typewriter on his mother’s kitchen table, grimly struggling from morning
until late at night to recite the history of the Kerouacs and America. The result would be
his first published book, “The Town and the City.”

September, 1949.
Jack joins his mother at the new Richmond Hill home at 94-21 134th St., a few blocks away from the chugging locomotives at the embankment of the Long Island Railroad.
Kerouac had a small bedroom upstairs in the two-storey house, a small front yard, their own telephone, # JA6-7843, and a TV where Jack would entertain himself watching baseball games. Here he would also begin his study of Buddhism, and type the notes that would later become part of a number of his books.
It was where “The Subterraneans” was written in three full moon nights in October, 1953,
and a month later, in response to a request from friends William Burroughs and Allen
Ginsberg, Kerouac would put together his Essentials of Spontaneous Prose. The family
would remain at Richmond Hill until February, 1955.

At this time, my mother was living alone in a little apartment in Jamaica Long Island…she had a tiny bedroom waiting for me…I settled down to long sweet sleeps, day-long meditations in the house, writing, and long walks around beloved old Manhattan a half hour subway ride away.
(LT, p. 104).

After one of their many journeys together, Jack and Neal end up at the newly-painted apartment in Richmond Hill.

We were so used to traveling we had to walk all over Long Island, but there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean, and we could only go so far.(JKL, p. 128).

Yes, 23 years after these dusty incidents of olden day, you and I arrived in Richmond Hill
in a ’50 Chrysler in the company of a meek man from Detroit on a cool Autumn day,
to 94-21 134th Street, my mother’s new apartment (and) unpacked our filthy gear we’d lugged all the way from a crooked little door in Russian Hill, San Francisco; climbed the stairs…talking and yelling up to my mother.
(JKL, p. 303)

In the ever more exciting big-traffic-all-of-it-pouring-into-New-York night we zoom down Queens Boulevard for the hundredth time in our friendship. (VOC, p. 13).

On Kerouac’s scroll of “On the Road,” a barely legible address appears in pencil that reads: 94-21 134th St., Richmond Hill, NY.


Resources:
(VD) “Vanity of Duluoz,” by Jack Kerouac (1968)
(JKL) “Jack Kerouac Selected Letters,’ edited by Ann Charters (1995)
(LT) “Lonesome Traveler,” by Jack Kerouac (1960)
(VOC) “Visions of Cody,” by Jack Kerouac (published in 1972)
Kerouac: A biography, by Ann Charters (1975)
Memory Babe: A critical biography, by Gerald Nicosia (1983)
Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac…, by Dennis McNally (1979)
Jack’s Book: an oral biography…, by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee (1978)
“Dharma Beat,” issue #6, Attila Gyenis and Mark Hemenway, editors
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Notes from Queens, summer 1996

LOOK UP AND SEE the fragmented sun through the zipperteeth exposures
of the overhead EL, flanked below by newsstands and Italian bakeries and cars
rattling through the intersection of Rockaway and Liberty, where Woodhaven pours
into Cross Bay Boulevard, crowned by the long symmetrical girders supporting the BMT line.

I walked up the long stairs in the summer of 1996 looking for a tokenbooth and slid out the
birth canal of WW II America, standing on a subway platform overlooking a hometown that
I don’t even remember.

Later, coming down from the platform, I walked through the old neighborhood.
Where were the children swinging broomsticks at a Spalding?
What happened to all the caps that used to cover the fire hydrants,
their silvercolored covers pitted with holes that made countrified waterfalls
when the water was squeezed through them?
Whatever happened to the concrete park on the avenue, the air acrid from the smoke
of old men lighting smelly cigars and rolling a bocci ball across the pebbly sawdust?

The monkey bars are still there, framed in the corner by a stone wall spray-painted
with a red heart, a broken arrow, and the initials of teenaged lovers at the bottom of which reads: Love, 4-E.

Thomas Dimopoulos
founder/editor Chronicles of Disorder